The rate of reporting, prosecution and convictions for rape varies considerably in different jurisdictions. The rape of women by men is by far the most frequent form of the assault.[1] Studies have found that the majority of rapes are committed by persons known to the victim, and that only 2% are committed by strangers.[2]

When part of a widespread and systematic practice, rape and sexual slavery are recognized as crimes against humanity and war crimes. Rape is also recognized as an element of the crime of genocide when committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a targeted group.

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Though definitions vary, rape is defined in most jurisdictions as sexual intercourse, or other forms of sexual penetration, by one person ("the accused" or "the perpetrator") with or against another person ("the victim") without the consent of the victim.

The term sexual assault is closely related to rape. Some jurisdictions define "rape" to cover only acts involving penile penetration of the vagina, treating all other types of non-consensual sexual activity as sexual assault. Other jurisdictions define all non-consensual sexual activity to be rape. But the terminology varies, with some places using other terms. For example, Michigan, United States uses the term "criminal sexual conduct".[3] In some jurisdictions, rape is defined in terms of sexual penetration of the victim, which may include penetration with objects, rather than body parts.[4] Some jurisdictions also consider rape to include the use of sexual organs of one or both of the parties, such as oral copulation and masturbation.

In recent years, women have been convicted of raping or sexually assaulting men; for example, by the use of an object or when the man is below the statutory age of consent. Also, in recent years women have also been convicted of rape or sexual assault by procuring a man to rape another woman, and by being an accomplice to a rape.

In Scotland, rape is a gender-specific crime, meaning it can only be committed by males upon females. Oral, anal and male rape do not constitute rape, nor is digital penetration sufficient.[5]

In Brazil, the definition of rape is even more restrictive. It is defined as non-consensual vaginal sex.[6] Therefore, unlike most of Europe and the Americas, male rape, anal rape, and oral rape are not considered to be rape. Instead, such an act is called a "violent attempt against someone's modesty" ("Atentado violento ao pudor"). The penalty, however, is the same.

In any allegation of rape, the absence of consent to sexual intercourse on the part of the victim is critical. Consent need not be express, and may be implied from the context and from the relationship of the parties, but the absence of objection does not of itself constitute consent.

Duress, in which the victim may be subject to or threatened by overwhelming force or violence, and which may result in absence of objection to intercourse, leads to the presumption of lack of consent. Duress may be actual or threatened force or violence against the victim or somebody else close to the victim. Even blackmail may constitute duress. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in its landmark 1998 judgment used a definition of rape which did not use the word consent. It defined rape as: "a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive."[7]

Consent can always be withdrawn before the actual sexual intercourse takes place, so that any further sexual activity after the withdrawal of consent constitutes rape.

The law would invalidate consent in the case of sexual intercourse with a person below the age at which they can legally consent to such relations. (See age of consent.) Such cases are sometimes called statutory rape or "unlawful sexual intercourse", regardless of whether it was consensual or not.

In times gone by and in many countries still today marriage is said to constitute at least an implied consent to sexual intercourse. However, marriage in many countries today is no longer a defence to rape or assault. In some jurisdictions, a person cannot be found guilty of the rape of a spouse, either on the basis of "implied consent" or (in the case of former British colonies) because of a statutory requirement that the intercourse must have been "unlawful" (which is legal nomenclature for outside of wedlock).[8] However, in many of those jurisdictions it is still possible to bring prosecutions for what is effectively rape by characterizing it as an assault.[9]

From time immemorial, rape has been regarded as spoils of war. Now it will be considered a war crime. We want to send out a strong message that rape is no longer a trophy of war.[10]

Rape, in the course of war, dates back to antiquity, ancient enough to have been mentioned in the Bible.[11] The Israelite, Greek, Persian and Roman troops would routinely rape women and boys in the conquered towns.

It has been alleged that an estimated 200,000 women were raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War by the Pakistani army[17], (though this has been disputed by many including the Indian academic Sarmila Bose [5]), and that at least 20,000 Bosnian Muslim women were raped by Serb forces during the Bosnian War.[18]
Wartime propaganda often alleges, and exaggerates, mistreatment of the civilian population by enemy forces and allegations of rape figure prominently in this. As a result, it is often very difficult, both practically and politically, to assemble an accurate view of what really happened.

Commenting on rape of women and children in recent African conflict zones Unicef said that rape was no longer just perpetrated by combatants but also by civilians. According to Unicef rape is common in countries affected by wars and natural disasters, drawing a link between the occurrence of sexual violence with the significant uprooting of a society and the crumbling of social norms. Unicef states that in Kenya reported cases of sexual violence doubled within days of post-election conflicts. According to Unicef rape was prevalent in conflict zones in Sudan, Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo.[19] It is estimated that there are as many as 200,000 surviving rape victims living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today.[20][21][22]

In 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found that systematic rape was used in the Rwandan genocide. The Tribunal held that "sexual assault [in Rwanda] formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide."[23] An estimated 500,000 women were raped during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.[24]

The indictment was of major legal significance and was the first time that sexual assaults were investigated for the purpose of prosecution under the rubric of torture and enslavement as a crime against humanity.[27] The indictment was confirmed by a 2001 verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that rape and sexual enslavement are crimes again humanity. This ruling challenged the widespread acceptance of rape and sexual enslavement of women as intrinsic part of war.[28]

There is no single theory that conclusively explains the motivation for rape; the motives of rapists can be multi-factorial and are the subject debate. Three primary emotions are thought to motivate rapists, anger, power and sadism, though sexual gratification and evolutionary pressures are also theorized as factors.

There are several types of rape, generally categorized by reference to the situation in which it occurs, the sex or characteristics of the victim, and/or the sex or characteristics of the perpetrator. Different types of rape include but are not limited to: date rape, gang rape, marital rape or spousal rape, prison rape, acquaintance rape, war rape and statutory rape.[29]

There have been many widely reported examples of false accusations of rape, including Mabel Hallam, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, Tawana Brawley and Crystal Gail Mangum, but the actual extent of false reporting is unknown. A.W. Burgess and R.R. Hazelwood observe that "little is published which addresses the issue and concept of false allegation." The classification of "false reporting" makes no distinction between women who wilfully misreport and women who mistakenly identify innocent men.[30] Figures on false reporting used by journalists have ranged from 2% to 50% depending on their sources:

"... one explanation for such a wide range in the statistics might simply be that they come from different studies of different populations... But there's also a strong political tilt to the debate. A low number would undercut a belief about rape as being as old as the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife: that some women, out of shame or vengeance ... claim that their consensual encounters or rebuffed advances were rapes. If the number is high, on the other hand, advocates for women who have been raped worry it may also taint the credibility of the genuine victims of sexual assault."[31]

In her work, "The Legacy of the Prompt Complaint Requirement, Corroboration Requirement, and Cautionary Instructions on Campus Sexual Assault", Michelle J. Anderson of the Villanova University School of Law states: "As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities remains unknown."[32] The FBI's 1996 Uniform Crime Report states that 8% of reports of forcible rape were determined to be unfounded upon investigation,[33] but that percentage does not include cases where an accuser fails or refuses to cooperate in an investigation or drops the charges. A British study using a similar methodology that does not include the accusers who drop out of the justice process found a false reporting rate of 8% as well.[34]

In 1994, Dr. Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University investigated the incidences, in one small urban community, of false rape allegations made to the police between 1978 and 1987. Unlike those in many larger jurisdictions, this police department had the resources to "seriously record and pursue to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits". The falseness of the allegations was not decided by the police, or by Dr. Kanin; they were "... declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false." The number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period.[35]

A 2006 paper by N.S. Rumney in the Cambridge Law Journal provided an exhaustive account of studies of false reporting in the USA, New Zealand and the UK.[36] A tabulated list of studies on false reporting published between 1968 and 2005 placed the percentage of false reports between a minimum on 1.5% (Theilade and Thomsen, 1986) and a maximum of 90% (Stewart, 1981). Rumney notes that early researchers tended to accept uncritically Freudian theories which purported to explain the prevalence of false allegations, while in more recent literature there has been "a lack of critical analysis of those who claim a low false reporting rate and the uncritical adoption of unreliable research findings" (p.157) Rumney concludes that "as a consequence of such deficiencies within legal scholarship, factual claims have been repeatedly made that have only limited empirical support. This suggests widespead analytical failure on the part of legal scholarship and requires an acknowledgement of the weakness of assumptions that have been constructed on unreliable research evidence".

A United Nations report compiled from government sources showed that more than 250,000 cases of rape or attempted rape were recorded by police annually. The reported data covered 65 countries.[37]

According to United States Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, there were overall 191,670 victims of rape or sexual assault reported in 2005.[38] Only 16% of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation. 1992).[39] 1 of 6 U.S. women has experienced an attempted or completed rape.[40]

According to a news report on BBC1 channel presented in 12 November 2007, there were 85,000 women raped in UK last year or about 230 cases every day. According to that report one of every 200 women in the UK was raped last year. The report also showed that only 800 persons were convicted in rape crimes that same year.[41][42]

Some types of rape are excluded from official reports altogether, (the FBI's definition for example excludes all rapes except forcible rapes of females), because a significant number of rapes go unreported even when they are included as reportable rapes, and also because a significant number of rapes reported to the police do not advance to prosecution.[43]

The rape of women by men is by far the most frequent form of the assault, with an estimated 91% of rape victims being female and 9% being male while 99% of offenders are male.[1] In contrast, rape by women is a barely understood phenomenon that is widely denied in most societies and one that usually causes surprise, shock, or utter revulsion.[44]

In the United States, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the adjusted per-capita victimization rate of rape has declined from about 2.4 per 1000 people (age 12 and above) in 1980 to about 0.4 per 1000 people, a decline of about 85%.[45] But other government surveys, such as the Sexual Victimization of College Women study, critique the NCVS on the basis it includes only those acts perceived as crimes by the victim, and report a higher victimization rate.[46]

While researchers and prosecutors do not agree on the exact percentage of false allegations, they generally agree on a range of 2% - 8%.[47]
The belief that false allegations of rape are a problem is common. Unfortunately, that belief can discourage victims from reporting for fear of being put on trial themselves:[48]

According to a report of the Defense Department Inspector General released in 2005, approximately 73% of women and 72% of men at the military service academies believe that false accusations of sexual assault are a problem.[49]

Cundiff (2004) argued that the inavailability of another outlet for male sexual desires, such as prostitution, may contribute to the prevalence of rape.[50]

The research on convicted rapists has found several important motivational factors in the sexual aggression of males.[51] Those motivational factors repeatedly implicated are having anger at women and having the need to control or dominate them.[51] In one study, it was found that rapists had less empathy toward women that had been sexually assaulted by an unknown assailant and more hostility toward women than nonsex offenders and nonoffender males.[52] Most rapists do not have a preference for rape over consensual sex.[53] Around 90% of rapists who participated in a 1986 study by Baxter et al. were more aroused by depictions of mutually enjoyable sex than violent rape.[54] There are not significant differences between the arousal patterns of rapists and nonrapists.[55]

From 2000-2005, 59% of rapes were not reported to law enforcement.[56][57] One factor relating to this is misconception that most rapes are committed by strangers.[58] In reality, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 38% of victims were raped by a friend or acquaintance, 28% by "an intimate" and 7% by another relative, and 26% were committed by a stranger to the victim. About four out of ten sexual assaults take place at the victim's own home.[59]

More than 67,000 cases of rape and sexual assaults against children were reported in 2000 in South Africa. Child welfare groups believe that the number of unreported incidents could be up to 10 times that number. A belief common to South Africa holds that sexual intercourse with a virgin will cure a man of HIV or AIDS. South Africa has the highest number of HIV-positive citizens in the world. According to official figures, one in eight South Africans are infected with the virus. Edith Kriel, a social worker who helps child victims in the Eastern Cape, said: “Child abusers are often relatives of their victims - even their fathers and providers.”[60]

Victims of rape can be severely traumatized by the assault and may have difficulty functioning as well as they had been used to prior to the assault, with disruption of concentration, sleeping patterns and eating habits, for example. They may feel jumpy or be on edge. After being raped it is common for the victim to experience Acute Stress Disorder, including symptoms similar to those of posttraumatic stress disorder, such as intense, sometimes unpredictable, emotions, and they may find it hard to deal with their memories of the event.[62][63] In the months immediately following the assault these problems may be severe and very upsetting and may prevent the victim from revealing their ordeal to friends or family, or seeking police or medical assistance. Additional symptoms of Acute Stress Disorder include:[63]

For one-third to one-half of the victims, these symptoms continue beyond the first few months and meet the conditions for the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder.[62][64][65] In general, rape and sexual assault are among the most common causes of PTSD in women.[64]

"Victim blaming" is holding the victim of a crime to be in whole or in part responsible for the crime. In the context of rape, this concept refers to the Just World Theory and popular attitudes that certain victim behaviours (such as flirting, or wearing sexually-provocative clothing) may encourage rape.[66] In extreme cases, victims are said to have "asked for it", simply by not behaving demurely. In most Western countries, the defense of provocation is not accepted as a mitigation for rape.[67] A global survey of attitudes toward sexual violence by the Global Forum for Health Research shows that victim-blaming concepts are at least partially accepted in many countries. In some countries, victim-blaming is more common, and women who have been raped are sometimes deemed to have behaved improperly. Often, these are countries where there is a significant social divide between the freedoms and status afforded to men and women.[68] Despite longstanding feminist campaigns of activism and agitprop dedicated to the elimination of harmful rape myths (attitudes and beliefs conducive to sexual violence), virulent memes persist; many members of the public still contend that at least some women are prone to masochism and deception.[69]

Some sociobiologists argue that our ability to understand rape, and thereby prevent it, is severely compromised because its basis in human evolution has been ignored.[72] Some studies indicate that it is an evolutionary strategy for certain males who lack the ability to persuade the female by non-violent means to pass on their genes.[73]

American social critic Camille Paglia, and some sociobiologists[How to reference and link to summary or text], have argued that the victim-blaming intuition may have a non-psychological component in some cases. Some sociobiological models suggest that it may be genetically-ingrained for certain men and women to allow themselves to be more vulnerable to rape, and that this may be a biological feature of members of the species.[74]

Rape has been regarded as "a crime of violence and control" since the 1970s. Psychological analysis literature identifies control as a key component in most definitions of privacy:

"Privacy is not the absence of other people from one's presence, but the control over the contact one has with them." (Pedersen, D. 1997).

"Selective control of access to the self." (Margulis, 2003)

Control is important in providing:

what is needed need for normal psychological functioning;

stable interpersonal relationships; and

personal development. (Pedersen, D. 1997)

Violation of privacy or "control" comes in many forms, with sexual assault and the resulting psychological traumas being one of the most explicit forms. Many victims of sexual assault suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, which also center around control issues. Therefore, some argue that it makes more sense to look at the issue of sexual assault as an invasion of privacy (Mclean, D. 1995):

The more comfortable a person is with talking about invasion of privacy and in insisting that he or she has privacy that deserves respect, the clearer that person’s understanding of rape will be…

Approaching rape through the concept of privacy helps bypass certain social stigmas.

In the United States, the principle of dual sovereignty applies to rape, as to other crimes. If the rape is committed within the borders of a state, that state has jurisdiction. If the victim is a federal official, an ambassador, consul or other foreign official under the protection of the United States, or if the crime took place on federal property or involved crossing state borders, or in a manner that substantially affects interstate commerce or national security, then the Federal Government also has jurisdiction. If a crime is not committed within any state, then Federal jurisdiction is exclusive: examples include the District of Columbia, naval or U.S.-flagged merchant vessels in international waters, or a U.S. military base. In cases where the rape involves both state and federal jurisdiction, the offender can be tried and punished separately for each crime without raising issues of double jeopardy.

Because there are 51 jurisdictions, each with its own criminal code, this section treats only the crime of rape in the federal courts and does not deal with state-by-state specifics. The term rape is not used in federal law. Rape is grouped with all forms of non consensual sexual acts under chapter 109a of the United States Code.

Under federal law the punishment for rape can range from a fine to the death penalty. The severity of the punishment is based on the use of violence, the age of the victim and whether drugs or intoxicants were used in the to override consent. If the perpetrator is a repeat offender the maximum sentence is automatically doubled.

Different categorizations and maximum punishments for rape under federal law[75][76]

Description

Fine

Imprisonment(years)

Life imprisonment

Rape using violence or the threat of violence to override consent

unlimited

0 - unlimited

yes

Rape by causing fear in the victim for themselves or for another person to override consent

unlimited

0 - unlimited

yes

Rape by giving a drug or intoxicant to a person that renders them unable to give consent

Drug, especially alcohol, use is frequently involved in rape. In 47% of rapes, both the victim and the perpetrator had been drinking. In 17%, only the perpetrator had been. 7% of the time, only the victim had been drinking. Rapes where neither the victim nor the perpetrator had been drinking were 29% of all rapes.[2]

Contrary to widespread belief, rape outdoors is rare. Over two thirds of all rapes occur in someone's home. 30.9% occur in the perpetrators' homes, 26.6% in the victims' homes and 10.1% in homes shared by the victim and perpetrator. 7.2% occur at parties, 7.2% in vehicles, 3.6% outdoors and 2.2% in bars.[2]

Most rape research and reporting to date has been limited to male-female forms of rape. Research on male-male and female-male is beginning to be done. However, almost no research has been done on female-female rape, though women can be charged with rape.[78]

↑Baxter, D.J., Barbaree, H.E., & Marshall, W.L. (1986). "Sexual responses to consenting and forced sex in a large sample of rapists and nonrapists," Behavioural Research and Therapy, 24, 513-520. Cited in Research on Sex Offenders: What do we Know?